Rating: 
Summary: Would give it a 0 star if I could.
Review: Whoa,Nellie! I've been looking forward to this book since it's proclamation. Had a damn time finding a copy. One single copy in the entire greater Los Angeles area, looks like. My God! Someone has written the ultimate distortion field book that makes Jobs and Gates look like amateurs. In the entire body of the text, he seems to think he has invented relativity, quantumn theory, chaos theory, the idea of algorithms, and every science and scientists that came before him were just a prelude to HIS COMING. ALL HAIL THE GREAT WOLFRAM! The "Mein Kempf" of science texts. Oh, by the way, there's no NEW new there in thiz book. Get it while u can. Soon to be a collector's item in the most infamous way!
Rating: 
Summary: So Far
Review: I have never been so tempted to put any book down so much. But each time, I just decide to read just a little bit more--and sure enough I discover something that begs me to read on. For whatever it's worth, this book is one to read. otherwise we can't really honestly conclude much.
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Summary: Complexity itself could be a randomness-by-choice
Review: (1) The "patterns" in the CA (cellular automaton) discovered thru human eyes might itself be comparable to anomalies sporadically occurring in a long list of numbers produced by a random number generators. For example, you can write a program that continuously generates (pseudo-) random numbers within the range of 0 thru 9, and chances are that some "patterns" (like, "... 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ...", "... 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 ...", etc) will "emerge" here and there so long as one has enough patience waiting for the "patterns" to emerge. -- In fact, given enough time, any desired possible "pattern" would emerge. But this does not entail any "intelligence" on the behalf of the observed object -- To the converse, it's the "intelligence" of the observing subject which interprets the object in a certain way. In fact, not every CA is capable of generating complex "patterns" -- only thru meticulous arrangements at the beginning of the game can we get certain "interesting" "patterns". Just as every interesting pattern-showing stretch in a random number list comes along with many times more of uninteresting stretches of numbers, for every one pattern-showing CA there are numerous others discarded as uninteresting... Of course, we cannot reduce all the characteristics of CA to a mundane model of a random number generator, because the former bears some rules and the latter is supposed to be pure randomness. However, what I want to point out is this: if even an enough long random number list can show some sophisticated "interesting" "patterns", what patterns are truly unimaginable with a manipulable CA spawning generation after generation?? (2) The idea of finding simple rules behind complex phenomena has been around since the very beginning of most civilizations, let alone since the inceptions of scientific communities. The real charm of CA lies in its self-organizing ability. But clearly this aspect of the CA model has been overblown....
Rating: 
Summary: An Audacious and Beautiful Book
Review: Twenty years ago, Stephen Wolfram was experimenting with Cellular Automata, computer displays that use simple rules to build themselves downwards from the pattern of colors above, when he made what he calls "the single most surprising discovery I have ever made." He had invented a cellular automaton which, from simple rules, in a very short computer program, produced a result as complex as anything a computer can do, or, he says, that any system can do. In the long-awaited _A New Kind of Science_ (Wolfram Media, Inc.), that particular cellular automaton is the foundation for an astonishingly wide-ranging tour of what CAs can do. Wolfram thinks that if we had had computers to show us the power of CAs centuries ago, science and mathematics would not have grown up along the lines of equations and calculations which all of us associate with scientific endeavors. We would have been examining complexity that inherently can come from simple systems, and we would have been a lot further along by now. He has put out his enormous book so that we can now start doing things right. He has spread his understanding of CAs into a scattershot sweep of intellectual concerns. He shows that the randomness in physical phenomena, like fluid turbulence or how materials crack, can be better explained by simple programs rather than chaos or complexity theory. He explains why the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the one that says entropy is always increasing) works. He shows that while evolution my control comparatively coarse features of plants and animals, the complex ones such as leaf or stem shape, or pigmentation markings, are better explained by simple programs. Stock market fluctuations, free will, space, time, and relativity all come under his sway. In fact, the whole universe may be governed by a simple program, and finding it would be a more worthy goal than trying to find a mathematical representation of some Theory of Everything. _A New Kind of Science_ is not light reading. The book is massive, at over 1,200 pages. Wolfram knows he is writing about a wealth of new ideas, and has deliberately tried to write so that any interested reader, not just a scientist or computer scientist, can understand him. To a large part he has succeeded, although I despair of anyone making plain to me the inner workings of relativity or quantum theory. He has not leavened these pages with humor or with anecdotes, but it is clear that this is a very personal work showing the deepest interests of its creator. His audacity is everywhere apparent; it is very seldom that he will admit, for instance, that in explaining the fundamental laws of physics "there is still some distance to go." Anyone who reads the whole book will get very used to his slightly tempered observations that "I very strongly suspect" or "I very strongly doubt." This is one of the best-looking books I have read in years. There is no use of color, but the diagrams (all produced by Wolfram's famous Mathematica software system) are frequent, perfectly integrated into the text, and often starkly beautiful in their own right. It could be that Wolfram will rightly be hailed as the Isaac Newton of the twenty-first century, and only time will tell. It is certain, however, that in a bold stroke Wolfram has laid down a challenge that scientists everywhere will have to face.
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Summary: Nice graphics, old content
Review: Just about everything that's in this book was said more succinctly in an April 1988 Atlantic Monthly article about Ed Fredkin's ideas. But pretty graphics, though.
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Summary: Look at the back inner flap...
Review: Now, imagine if aliens abducted George Constanza, and for the lark of it, injected him with drugs to give him a billion times his current IQ, and oh...about twice his current ego, modesty and honesty. We would get....Stephen Wolfram! Reading this book, you would think the fairly potty Mr. Worlfram invented the fields of Cellular Automata, Chaos Theory and Complexity. Though many of the experiments described in the book are fascinating to a CA novice like myself, the author's conculsion that he has come up with a new theory of everything suggests early senility and delusions of grandeur. George Constanza would definitely patent or copyright the laws of the universe, if he could. That part, Mr. Wolfram got right....
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Summary: I ordered this book Dec 2000 and it was worth the wait
Review: There is a whole new world out there.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely difficult read due to intentionally poor grammar
Review: The author adopts a very unusual convention in the prose of this entire book: he regularly begins sentences with conjunctions. In my opinion, and after making quite a few attempts to read more than a few pages, this book is nigh unreadable because of it...The author makes no secret of this convention; indeed, he discusses this choice in the beginning of the "notes" section of the book. Unfortunately, his justification is hollow, as most of his sentences and paragraphs would stand perfectly well without the ubiquitous beginning "buts," "fors," "yets," and "ands." Paragraphs with every sentence beginning with a conjunction - including even the first - regularly make an appearance. I highly recommend avoiding this book if you are the type of person who is in the least bit troubled by poor grammar, typos, poor sentence flow, or awkward sentence structure. Being of this sort myself, I found my train of thought interrupted regularly, unable to absorb any of the material due to this unorthodox style. Eventually I found myself simply scanning the words, without comprehension, hoping to avoid the constantly jarring leading conjunctions. At that point, after quite a few tries over several days in attempting to read this book, I set it aside. Hopefully a second edition will come out with orthodox grammar, but it is unlikely, as the author seems to take a relatively egoistic tone throughout. Read the first chapter of the "notes" when you browse the book in a store to get a feel for this egoism, or the preface to get a feel for his grammar. I apologize for not providing a decent review of the content of the book (as in my typical reviews), but the presentation problems prevented me from absorbing any of the content anyway.
Rating: 
Summary: Judging by Stephen's prior accomplishments...
Review: I used Mathematica back when I was a research student - not long ago. It is one of the most innovative software I have ever used. It may not be the most stable, bug-free software - but it presented opportunities that never had been easily achievable before. It was just not possible to work on the analytic part of science before it - we have to live with numerical approximations of equations. Now - I am trying to get hold of a copy of this book - but with no luck. Good, I like that - lot of people out there to get hold of a copy too. Anyway if this book is as good and innovative as Mathematica was (is), then I dont doubt for a moment the validity of concepts presented in this book. However, unlike some not-so-patient readers out there, I will reserve my final thoughts and comments till I get the copy of this book and read all the 1000+ pages in it. I urge others to do the same - for sanity's sake. Heard of FUD?
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Summary: Extremely annoying book discredits his ideas.
Review: Wolfram messed up big time in this book. It is very badly written
and designed. His writing is hugely, vastly self-important as well as highly affected. (He claims that's necessary for clarity! A joke, presumably.) Every other paragraph starts with "So, what does this mean for.... (whatever). He uses phrases such as "simple rules lead to complex behavior... probably 1000 times. He constantly claims to have discovered the simple rules idea, which is just totally, utterly, wrong. The book is at least 4 times too long and rather boring, and cellular automata is a field I know something about. The figures are tiny and many are useless. Some ideas are overexplained, yet the more important ones are glossed over and made hard to understand. The book's margins are enormous, wasting space. By creating such a mess he has done a huge disfavor to those of his ideas that have merit. But given his vast overestimate of his own importance, I can't feel sorry. No reputable publisher would put this book out the way it is. He shoud hire a science writer, step out of the picture, and start over. Then we could evaluate whatever value his ideas have.
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